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To be JPG or not to be?
I'm often asked what is the right or the best file format to save you images in?
Good question... and one that you need to know the answer to if you're going to be doing any sort of photo editing and Saving in Photoshop.
It really depends on what you are going to be doing with and what the images are to be used for. If you are making any sort of edits to your images you should be saving your master image (the one you work on) in a Lossless format e.g. PSD, or TIF (TIF is sometimes preferred as you can apply some compression without any loss of image quality and also all the layers are saved just like a native PSD file).
What is a Lossless format?
Quite simply it is a file format that does not destroy your image pixels with compression when it is saved. So you can save your image over and over again and it will retain it's quality.
If you're using images for the internet you will be saving in JPG and GIF.
JPG files for the continuous tone images e.g. Photographs and in GIF format for spot color or simple color images.
JPG format is a 'lossy' format meaning that it uses a compression alogorithm to try and reduce the file size by throwing away data (part of your image) depending on the quality setting you have chosen.
There is always the trade off with JPG files between quality and file size, the more quality you are prepared to sacrafice the smaller your file size will be, which is the challenge for anyone building websites, to reduce the file size as much as possible but still maintain an acceptable level of quality.
Most photo labs only accept JPG files to print. When taking your digital images to the photo lab ensure that you have sized the photos and got the resolution correct (normally 300dpi) and using an acceptable color space for them sRGB or Adobe RGB are normally the go.
It helps if you do the homework and take a few minutes to prepare your files so you know what you can expect to get back from the lab and you don't get any nasty surprises!
Keep your master images seperate from your images that you will use to be printed at the local photo lab or even on your own printer. A good practice can be to have a folder called 'Master' for your master images and say 'Runouts' for your images to be run out at the lab.
Kind Regards,
Shane Goldberg
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop CS2
CEO
ProPhotoSecrets.com
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